THE CONCEPT OF UNEMPLOYMENT.

The article presents a discussion related to the concept of unemployment. Unemployment is a family name for a whole brood of concepts, but the concepts vary so widely in size and character that no one of them represents the others. The single, all-use measure is not unemployment at all, but some magnitude of illegitimate conception with the courtesy title. The father of the magnitude is more likely to be statistical expediency than economic theory, social philosophy, or even government policy. The magnitude, forced to serve all purposes, cannot safely be used to serve any important purpose. Certainly one cannot use it to indicate the involuntarily unused productive power of the nation or the morale efficiency of the system, for it does not count the enforced idleness of the most productive workers, either because they do not have the nominal status of employees, because they are employed part of the time or at token work, or because they do not seek work, though desperately needing and wishing work and definitely employable. One cannot even use the magnitude as an index of fluctuation of unemployment, for these classes of uncovered idleness, especially part-time unemployment, vary out of all proportion to the covered idleness, indeed, they have become institutional devices to suppress unemployment.